by Leo Damrosch
At times Stella is permitted to mock Swift in reply: “So flap ee hand, and make wry mouth ee self sawci doxi.”48
There is much talk about the physical reality of Stella’s letters—anticipating them, receiving them, opening them, and reacting to them. Swift sometimes narrates the process moment by moment, in a sort of flirty foreplay. During the cold London winters he spent a lot of time reading and writing in bed, and Stella accompanies him there:
I am now got into bed, and going to open your little letter; and God send I may find MD well, and happy, and merry, and that they love Pdfr as they do fires. Oh, I won’t open it yet! yes I will! no I won’t. I am going; I can’t stay till I turn over [the page]. What shall I do? My fingers itch; and now I have it in my left hand; and now I’ll open it this very moment.—I have just got it, and am cracking the seal, and can’t imagine what’s in it.”
At another time, “Now let us come and see what this saucy dear letter of MD says. Come out, letter, come out from between the sheets; here it is underneath, and it won’t come out. Come out again, I say: so there. Here it is.”49
There is a startling moment when Swift begins an entry right after waking up, and imagines Stella in Dublin getting up too: “Ppt is just now showing a white leg, and putting it into the slipper.” Could this have some relation to an odd dream that he described earlier? In the dream he imagined that a mysterious saying was circulating about town: “I have desired Apronia to be always careful, especially about the legs.” Stella had asked Swift to buy her an apron, and there was a good deal of discussion about it. Is Apronia, then, the apron with white legs underneath? Three days before this Swift had made an overt double entendre: “’Tis still terribly cold.—I wish my cold hand was in the warmest place about you, young women.”50
In one respect Swift continues to be Stella’s tutor: he reproves mistakes in spelling. “Rediculous, madam? I suppose you mean ridiculous; let me have no more of that.” “Pray, Ppt, explain those two words of yours to me, what you mean by villian, and dainger.” At one point Swift made a list of fourteen misspellings in a single letter, and Stella dutifully wrote in corrections beside each word:
Dineing—dining
Houeur—hour
Intellegence—intelligence
Phamphlets—pamphlets51
This wasn’t pedantic bullying on Swift’s part. He often pointed out that intelligent women weren’t doing themselves justice if their spelling was terrible. He told a friend, “A woman of quality, who had excellent good sense, was formerly my correspondent, but she scrawled and spelt like a Wapping wench, having been brought up in a court at a time before reading was thought of any use to a female; and I knew several others of very high quality with the same defect.” He may have been thinking of Lady Orkney, whom he described as “a person of as much good natural sense and judgment as I have ever known,” but with “neither orthography, grammar, nor choice of words.”52
Swift’s own spelling was erratic at times, and he noted the experience of suddenly feeling unsure about a familiar word:
Pray let us have no more bussiness, but busyness—the deuce take me if I know how to spell it. Your wrong spelling, MD, has put me out: it does not look right. Let me see, bussiness, busyness, business, bisyness, bisness, bysness; faith, I know not which is right, I think the second. I believe I never writ the word in my life before; yes, sure I must, though; business, busyness, bisyness.—I have perplexed myself, and can’t do it. Prithee ask Walls. Business, I fancy that’s right. Yes it is; I looked in my own pamphlet, and found it twice in ten lines, to convince you that I never writ it before. Oh, now I see it as plain as can be; so yours is only an s too much.53
A note of affectionate intimacy pervades the Journal to Stella, especially at the ends of letters: “Farewell, my dearest lives and delights, I love you better than ever, if possible, as hope [to be] saved, I do, and ever will . . . and so farewell, dearest MD; Ppt, DD, Pdfr, all together, now and forever all together. Farewell again and again.” But during the course of 1711 the endearments diminish, and so do the protestations that Swift misses Ireland. In November of that year we find the last emotional effusion: “Farewell, dearest MD, and love Ppt, who loves MD infinitely above all earthly things.” A few days previously Swift had admitted that if Stella and Rebecca weren’t in Ireland, “I believe seriously I should not think of the place twice a year.”54
And how often, at this point, was he thinking even of them? Detailed and confiding as the Journal to Stella is, there is one very remarkable omission. Not once does he mention Esther Vanhomrigh, a young woman in whose company he had begun to spend a great deal of time.
CHAPTER 15
Enter Vanessa
A COVERT RELATIONSHIP
In 1707, during a previous stay in England, Swift spent the night at an inn in Dunstable in Bedfordshire, halfway between Leicester and London. It happened that a family just arrived from Dublin was there too, a widow named Mrs. Vanhomrigh, her sons Bartholomew and Ginkel, and her daughters Esther and Mary. Esther, the eldest, was nineteen and extremely good-looking. Swift found the whole group appealing, and when he returned to London in 1710 he began to see them regularly. We know Esther now by the name he gave her in a poem later on, Vanessa, combining the first syllable of her last name with her nickname, Hessy.
The late Bartholomew Vanhomrigh, pronounced “Vannummery,” was a Dutch merchant who had come to Ireland after the arrival of William III. He was naturalized and became a prominent citizen of Dublin, serving in 1697 as its lord mayor. An acquaintance described him as “a small, funny, and quick-speaking man.”1 It’s possible that Swift had known the family in Dublin, but the Dunstable encounter is the first that we know of. At Bartholomew’s death in 1703, his widow had inherited ₤16,000, and was now on her way to settle in London.
Whenever Swift mentioned an attractive woman in the Journal to Stella, he was careful to forestall suspicions. After striking up a “mighty friendship” with a Lady Kerry, he commented that “we are almost in love with one another,” but hastened to add, “she is most egregiously ugly.”2 Vanessa was egregiously pretty.
Since Swift was also in the habit of reporting to Stella where he dined every midday, he evidently thought it unwise to omit the Vanhomrighs completely. References to them were casual, however, and immediately followed by something else:
This has been an insipid day. I dined with Mrs. Vanhomrigh, and came gravely home, after just visiting the Coffee House. . . .
I was mortified enough today, not knowing where in the world to dine, the town is so empty; I met H. Coote, and thought he would invite me, but he did not. Sir John Stanley did not come into my head, so I took up with Mrs. Van, and dined with her and her damned landlady, who, I believe, by her eyebrows, is a bawd. This evening I met Addison and Pastoral Philips in the Park, and supped with them at Addison’s lodgings. We were very good company; and yet know no man half so agreeable to me as he is. I sat with them till twelve.
Stella knew about the pastoral poet Ambrose Philips, and when Addison was working for the lord lieutenant in Dublin, she had met and liked him. No doubt the mention of Addison would have mainly drawn her attention. Swift’s suspicion about the landlady, incidentally, was confirmed a few weeks later, though it’s not clear why her eyebrows were a tip-off.3
At least fifty-five meals at the Vanhomrighs’ can be identified, and there were doubtless more. And although Swift was apparently reluctant to lie about where he dined, he felt no obligation to mention visits that didn’t include meals. He says, for example, “I dined with a friend in St. James’s Street,” but fails to add, as his account book shows, that he then went on to play cards at the Vanhomrighs’. A week later he says, “Mr. Lewis and I dined with a friend of his,” but not that there were once again cards at the Vanhomrighs’. The account books also record occasions when he paid generously for Vanessa to travel by coach in London, either riding with him or meeting him at some destination.4
But Stella did becom
e suspicious. Just five weeks after Swift returned to London in 1710, he wrote, “I was at a loss today for a dinner, unless I would have gone a great way, so I dined with some friends that board hereabout, as a sponger.” We don’t have the letter in which Stella called him on this, but we have his indignant response to it: “What do you mean, ‘that boards near me, that I dine with now and then?’ I know no such person; I don’t dine with boarders. What the pox! You know whom I have dined with every day since I left you, better than I do.”5 No, she didn’t. Presumably the Vanhomrighs kept their own cook and were technically renters, not boarders, which makes his statement a white lie, but the smokescreen is obvious.
Mrs. Vanhomrigh had high social aspirations, and Swift often met interesting people at her house. One whom he did tell Stella about was a cousin of theirs named Anne Long, a noted beauty who was celebrated as a “toast” by the Kit-Cat Club to which Addison and other Whigs belonged. (The whimsical name came from the tavern where they met, run by a Christopher Catling.) In a facetious Decree for Concluding the Treaty between Dr. Swift and Mrs. Long, Swift declared his “sole and undoubted right” to require that a lady be the one to make the first advances, but that Anne has thus far held back, “to the great grievance and damage of Mrs. Vanhomrigh and her fair daughter Hessy.” That was a name that Stella never once heard.
We, out of our tender regard to truth and justice, having heard and duly considered the allegations of both parties, do declare, adjudge, decree, and determine that the said Mrs. Long, notwithstanding any privileges she may claim as aforesaid as a Lady of the Toast, shall, without essoin [excuse for not appearing in court] or demur, in two hours after the publishing of this our decree, make all advances to the said Doctor that he shall demand; and that the said advances shall not be made to the said Doctor as un homme sans conséquence, but purely on account of his great merit.6
Anne Long did become Swift’s friend, but her story had an unhappy ending. In desperate money trouble, she fled her creditors by moving to King’s Lynn in Norfolk and living there under an assumed name. She and Swift seem to have corresponded regularly, though few of their letters have survived. In November of 1711 she told him, “As to my health, that was much out of order last summer. My distemper was a dropsy or ahstma (you know what I mean, but I cannot spell it right) or both, lazy distempers, which I was too lazy to molest whilst they would let me sit in quiet.” Her condition was now getting worse and she had seen a doctor, “by whose advice I am now well enough.” Swift wrote back some weeks later with his customary advice: “Your illness is the effect of too little exercise.” He added darkly, “Health is worth preserving, though life is not.” It was too late. Three days later she was dead.7
Swift took it hard. He told Stella, “I never was more afflicted at any death,” and he published a notice in the Post Boy saying that Anne was “celebrated for her beauty, virtue, and good sense.” (The Post Boy was a pro-Tory paper run by a journalist named Abel Roper, whom Swift referred to as “my humble slave.”) In his account book he noted Anne’s death and called her “the most beautiful person of the age she lived in, of great honour and virtue, infinite sweetness and generosity of temper, and true good sense.”8
Whatever Swift’s feelings were toward Anne Long, it was Vanessa he was preoccupied with. His move to Chelsea afforded a reason to visit the Vanhomrighs more often than ever, for he would arrive hot and sweaty after his walk through the fields to London, and it was convenient to keep his best gown and wig at their house. He mentioned doing this to Stella in an offhand way that suggested boredom rather than interest: “I am so hot and lazy after my morning’s walk that I loitered at Mrs. Vanhomrigh’s, where my best gown and periwig are, and out of mere listlessness dine there very often, as I did today.” Five days later it was the same story: “Heat and laziness, and Sir Andrew Fountaine, made me dine today again at Mrs. Van’s.”9
As for the return to Chelsea, Swift described it in detail, as if to deflect attention from the starting point. “My way is this: I leave my best gown and periwig at Mrs. Vanhomrigh’s, then walk up the Pall Mall, through the Park, out at Buckingham House, and so to Chelsea a little beyond the church. I set out about sunset, and get here in something less than an hour; it is two good miles, and just five thousand seven hundred and forty-eight steps; so there is four miles a day walking, without reckoning what I walk while I stay in town.” No doubt he didn’t actually count every step, but was playfully naming an exact number. But was it a thought of Vanessa that then provoked an uncharacteristic innuendo? “When I pass the Mall in the evening it is prodigious to see the number of ladies walking there; and I always cry shame at the ladies of Ireland, who never walk at all, as if their legs were of no use but to be laid aside.”10 The emphasis is Swift’s.
Only a few letters between Swift and Vanessa survive from this period, since they saw each other often and didn’t need to write. But one evening Swift remarked in the Journal, “I have been writing letters all this evening till I am weary.” Since the letters still exist, we know that one was to Anne Long and another to Vanessa, in which he signed off, “Adieu till we meet over a pot of coffee, or an orange and sugar, in the Sluttery, which I have so often found to be the most agreeable chamber in the world.”11 According to the OED, “sluttery” in this context means “an untidy room; a work-room.” Perhaps it was a sewing room. At any rate, it wasn’t the parlor in which guests would ordinarily be entertained. In the Sluttery, Vanessa and Swift could be alone.
What exactly was going on? Glendinning, though not prudish, believes it was just comfortable companionship: “I think they made coffee together in the Sluttery, bent over the fire or spirit lamp, making their private jokes, their heads close, their hands touching as they managed the kettle and coffeepot; and then sat back in their chairs, and talked, forgetting the coffee, reminding one another to drink it.”12 In this tenderly soft-core vision, their hands touched, but only their hands.
Ehrenpreis, who dismisses Vanessa as “a peripheral pastime,” is sure it wasn’t even that. Swift was inhibited, he says, by an “anxious asexualism,” and explained to Vanessa that he lacked “the amative faculty” (Ehrenpreis’s term, not Swift’s). Confident that this most secretive of men has no secrets from his biographer, he concludes, “Judging from Swift’s habits over many years, I believe he made no improper advances to Hessy.”13
We know, however, that Vanessa contrived to be alone with Swift, for he told Anne Long, “She will bid her sister go downstairs before my face, for she has some private business with the Doctor.” And mentions of “coffee” began to play a curiously prominent role. Writing from Windsor, Swift tells Vanessa that he’s thinking of her in her bed. “I cannot imagine how you pass your time in our absence, unless by lying a-bed till twelve, and then having your followers about you till dinner. . . . What do you do all the afternoons? . . . I will steal to town one of these days and catch you napping. . . . I long to drink a dish of coffee in the Sluttery, and hear you dun me for secrets, and—drink your coffee—why don’t you drink your coffee.” Vanessa was in her midtwenties (seven years younger than Stella) and Swift in his midforties, “an age,” as Johnson remarks, “when vanity is strongly excited by the amorous attention of a young woman.”14 And it is not usual for a person with high energy and strong appetites to be sexually apathetic.
Meanwhile, the tender passages in the Journal to Stella were drying up, and the apron that Swift sent can’t have been much of a compensation. In Louise Bogan’s crisp summary,
Hypocrite Swift sent Stella a green apron
And dead desire.15
One thing is certain, as Swift confirmed in a poem never meant for publication: Vanessa loved him passionately and longed to be loved in return. While he was at Windsor she alarmed him by threatening to bring their relationship into the open. In London it was Mrs. Van whom he ostensibly visited; for her young unmarried daughter to meet him elsewhere would be deeply imprudent. Vanessa’s servant turned up at Windsor to give Swift
a book and to say that Vanessa and her sister Mary (nicknamed Molkin or Molly) were on their way to Oxford, and were now spending the night at Beaconsfield, ten miles away. His hastily scribbled reply still exists, because Vanessa saved it, blotted because he sealed it before the ink had dried.
The note begins, “I did not forget the coffee,” and then states decisively, “I would not see you for a thousand pounds if I could.” He was afraid, too, that she might be recognized in Oxford. “I doubt [that is, suspect] you do wrong to go to Oxford, but now that is past, since you cannot be in London tonight; and if you do not inquire for acquaintance, but let somebody in the inn go about with you among the colleges, perhaps you will not be known, adieu.”16 Since Oxford is forty-five miles from Windsor, it’s not clear what Swift was worried about. He may have been afraid she would encounter someone he knew and reveal too much about why she and Mary were traveling without their mother.
CADENUS AND VANESSA
In this increasingly precarious situation, Swift now wrote a very long poem, by turns playful and earnest, that would trace the course of their relationship and explain his reluctance to respond to Vanessa’s desire. It is an enormous poem for a man who usually wrote short ones, nearly nine hundred lines long. Swift called it Cadenus and Vanessa, naming himself with an anagram of decanus, Latin for “dean,” which indicates that the second half of the poem, which is where “Decanus” first appears, must have been written after he was appointed dean of St. Patrick’s in 1713. He probably began it, however, at Windsor in 1712. It got into print after Vanessa’s death only because she stipulated in her will that it should.17
In the story as Swift tells it, Vanessa is an exceptional being, created in an unprecedented partnership between Venus, goddess of love, and Athena, goddess of wisdom. The opening section of the poem is often described as absurdly artificial, since Venus holds a legal hearing to decide whether men or women are most responsible for the decline of true love, and then tricks Athena into helping to create Vanessa (Athena mistakes the infant for a boy). But it has been persuasively argued that Swift is using the pagan gods, as many writers did, to dramatize the complexities and contradictions of human nature. The God of the Bible is all-powerful and all-wise; the Greek gods are humanly fallible, and often in bitter conflict with each other.18